Year 6 Annual Report: Advance Program

The Program worked closely with 11 partner technical institutions and 27 corresponding degree programs to strengthen their capacity to serve disadvantaged students in Jamaica, Honduras, and Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. In Year 6, the Program successfully closed operations in Honduras and most in Guatemala, concluding efforts with two final virtual events that included participation from over 300 key stakeholders. The Program expanded its communication channels, including a revamped website, Instagram, and YouTube accounts, to disseminate key activities, such as scholarship announcements in the Dominican Republic and business competitions in Jamaica. Advance also leveraged its new communication channels to reach a wider audience and share learnings with the higher education community, including publishing technical papers and guides on the new website. In the Dominican Republic, the Program secured signed partnership agreements with two education institutions and conducted cross-cutting assessments to select degree programs and plan activities for Year 7. In Jamaica, the Program continued to support the transition to distance learning, converting in-person courses to e-courses and training faculty in digital skills. The Program was also extended in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic to continue implementing planned activities and allow more time for scholarship holders to graduate. The Program reported an additional $161,297 in cost share, reaching a total of $3,212,084 across all countries. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, the Program continued to work closely with partner institutions to ensure students could graduate by accessing online courses and gaining practical experience. The support provided by the Advance Program through formal coaching and informal coaching was critical in understanding the challenges faced by students, identifying solutions, and encouraging them to complete their studies. The Program supported 455 students to complete their studies or graduate, for a total of 1,070 through the life of the Program. Other notable results under Result 1 include completing all curriculum revisions in Jamaica, Honduras, and Guatemala, and finalizing the last degree program, Primary Care Nursing, at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala. The Program also supported universities to respond to COVID-19 by pivoting content to virtual and blended modalities, incorporating industry specialists' inputs in course content, and conducting teacher training workshops on digital skills. The Program designed and implemented a virtual course for over 300 participants, including technical advisors at the Ministry of Education, leveraging the excellent results from the pre-service teaching training pilot in socioemotional learning (SEL) in Jamaica. The Program also supported the professional development of 409 faculty and university staff, including webinars on relevant subject-matter expertise for selected professionals in Jamaica and a workshop on competency-based approaches to curriculum revisions for teaching professionals and administrators in the Dominican Republic. The Program supported students' transition to the workforce through innovative ways to replace in-person labor bridging activities, entrepreneurship, and practical components of courses. Highlights include the opening of the Agroprocessing learning lab at the Knockalva Polytechnic campus in Jamaica, which allows students to create their own products with guidance from industry specialists, and the delivery of two virtual training certificates (diplomados) for 30 students on entrepreneurship skills and local economic development in Guatemala. The Program delivered the first virtual job fair for degree programs in close collaboration with partner university, UPANA, and its job board, leveraging relationships with private sector partners, such as Doconomy in Guatemala. Over 200 participants attended the fair and registered in a platform that allowed them to create profiles for potential employers, showcasing their technical and soft skills.